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Brigid Bergin: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Brian today. Now, we continue the Centennial Series, 100 Years of 100 Things. In honor of Black History Month, we'll dedicate this series to examining issues of racial inequality in the US. We're up to thinking thing number 66, the color line. The term the color line was taken from an 1881 article by Frederick Douglass and it was originally used as a reference to racial segregation after the abolition of slavery. It's come to represent the way people of color experience barriers in society.

While it was only in 1967 that the Supreme Court struck down state laws that banned interracial marriage, family histories have shown that the color line between Black and white ancestors were sometimes crossed either through love or force. Joining us now for this latest installment of our series is Martha Jones, legal and cultural historian at Johns Hopkins University. Her forthcoming book examines her own family's long history along America's jagged color line and what that's meant for her, her family, and the society at large. The book is titled The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir. Professor Jones, welcome to WNYC.

Martha Jones: Thanks for having me, Brigid.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, as we always do with this series, we can take your oral histories. We're going to open the phones now for families who have also dealt with mixed-race issues. If you are biracial or part of a biracial couple, we want to hear your stories. What challenges did you battle? What were the triumphs? Maybe you thought you were either Black or white, but with the popularity of at-home ancestry kits, you found out otherwise. Anyone out there been able to trace back their family history and discover something about your ancestors?

We want to hear your stories. Call us now. The number is 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also text at that number. Professor Jones, I mentioned in the intro thing number 66 in this series, the color line. Can you help us define that phrase, how you use it in your book?

Martha Jones: Sure. I think frequently we use the phrase the color line to imagine a world that is divided by a bright line, perhaps by a wall or a fence. I think the metaphor is intended to suggest to us that Black and white Americans, in particular, have separate histories, separate communities, separate families, separate stories. In my book, I come to term this line the jagged color line as a way of helping us appreciate that that line, if it indeed exists, is uneven, fragmentary, and in many cases a dangerous place for those of us who bump up against it. We are wounded. We carry scars from our encounter with the color line. It's hardly a benign place.

Brigid Bergin: Professor Jones, you write about how your parents were an interracial couple who were married in the late 1950s in New York. We're going to get to that story in a bit. First, you write through that it seemed progressive at the time, they weren't the first couple in your family to cross the color line. Can you take us back to the 1800s and tell us a little bit more about your ancestors?

Martha Jones: Yes, it's one of the discoveries in this book for me. I had been raised to think my parents were the first. They were outliers, they were outlaws in 1957, but I went back to discover my great-great grandparents, Elijah and Mary Jones, who lived in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Mary began her life as a so-called white woman. Elijah was a man of color. North Carolina law, as it had since 1715, prohibited so-called people of color and white people from marrying. They were intent on doing so.

Mary joins our family tree. In doing so, she not only defies the legal strictures against her marriage to Elijah, she gives up, in essence, her origins as a white woman and becomes for the remainder of her life what was then referred to as a woman of color.

Brigid Bergin: The 1920s were a period of prosperity for a lot of Americans, including some Black Americans. That decade also saw the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, many jurisdictions utilized the one-drop rule to differentiate between white individuals and people of color. Do you want to talk for a moment about that period of time and how it intersects with your book?

Martha Jones: Sure. By the 1920s, we're seeing the confluence of many things, including the consequences of the remaking of the face of the nation, both through immigration and through empire. We're seeing the rise of a pseudoscience called eugenics that is preoccupied with racial purity. Of course, we are at a high point in the Jim Crow regime, the regime of segregation and disenfranchisement. In my story, yes, there are lawmakers who are intent, as they do in Virginia, where they enact a Racial Integrity Act. This is where we get the reference to the one-drop rule. This notion that one drop of blood makes one Black or negro or colored in the 1920s.

Virginia's laws are also criminalizing marriage across the color line. In my family, folks are pretty deferential to the color line in this period, there is a great deal of tension and, of course, there's a great deal of violence associated with the color line. They are interested in and participate in some forward-looking experiments in race science. One conducted by a Black anthropologist at Harvard, Caroline Bond Day. Bond Day is studying so-called mixed-race people, as we'd call them today. Are those people defective? Are they different from other Americans?

She uses some very old school and today discredited methods like hair texture and skin color and more to try and-- skull size, to try and ferret this out. Day is driving at something, a long-standing suspicion among American race scientists that mixed race, so-called mixed race people, or in her vernacular, hybrid people, are somehow defective and even perhaps destined for extinction. My own grandmother sends Caroline Bond Day a family tree, some photographs, and hair. Her small part in trying to restore the humanity of mixed-race people through Day's study.

Brigid Bergin: I understand much later on when DNA testing became available that hair was analyzed. What did you find out about your grandmother's heritage?

Martha Jones: Oh, I apologize because I don't think it's been analyzed. It has been the subject of some reflection on the part of Harvard University and its Peabody Museum where osteologists and other scientists have long been the custodians of what we sometimes refer to as human remains. The accounting now to communities and to descendants who themselves have claims not only on the remains of Black Americans at the Peabody, but the remains of Native Americans as well.

Brigid Bergin: I want to bring some of our listeners who want to share their stories into the conversation with us. Let's go to Robert in Delaware. Robert, thanks for calling.

Robert: How are you doing? I'm originally from Iowa. I moved out here to the East Coast in '86, but I always wondered who I was. My adoptive parents passed away when I was pretty young and I went to University of Iowa, played football there, had some heart problems in the '40s. I tried to-- Iowa is a closed adoption state, so they wouldn't give me any information on my pre-adoption birth certificate. Finally, in 2021, they passed a law and they changed it. I could submit a form to get my pre-adoption birth certificate. I finally did.

My adoptive parents used to always tell me I was Native American. I found out my mother's white and my father's Black. My father's from Jersey City, my mother with the University of Iowa, they hooked up there. That's what I came about. I didn't realize all this time I was walking in the same footsteps as my mother and father. He went to Iowa before me. My brother went to Iowa after me. My father got his law degree from Seton Hall. My son got his. He graduated from Seton Hall. He's a basketball player there. It's just been crazy ever since.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Robert: Insane. I finally met my mother a couple of years ago and never thought I would ever find out who I was as far as meeting her or that situation. It's been a beautiful thing.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. Robert, thank you so much for calling and sharing that story. Professor Jones, I heard you reacting in real-time, but what is that? What are some of your thoughts hearing Robert's story?

Martha Jones: First of all, thank you, Robert, for sharing the story. I think there are two things, one, is Robert's telling us that to get to the bottom of the story, he has to navigate a great deal. Not only his own family dynamics, but he has to navigate law. This is part of the story for us as we look to recreate these stories, that not all stories come to us easily, not all of them are forthcoming.

The other thing that I connect to Robert is the way in which learning these stories at whatever point in our lives, but when we learn these stories, it changes us. It reveals things to us about ourselves that we might have thought were ordinary or unremarkable. It's a reminder that family history is one source for how many of us make sense of our lives, even in the 21st century.

Brigid Bergin: Professor Jones, I want to go back to some of your family history. You write about your ancestor Fanny, who by the 1930s in St. Louis began "passing," meaning passing for white. It was also at this time that the Black-owned St. Louis Argus wrote about how passing was dangerous. You write. Can you tell us more about that and why you think Fanny chose to "dance along the color line" in your words despite that?

Martha Jones: Yes. Fanny was a figure I was very reluctant to visit in this book because I think there is sometimes the view that passing was delegitimizing or denigrating or rejection of Black identity. When I dove deeper into Fanny's life, I recognized she lived most of her days as a unremarkably African American woman. She belongs and leads a Black YWCA. She's a delegate to the NAAC convention in the 1930s and more. Fanny has a bit of a trickster in her. She has a bit of a defiant soul that runs through her. That means that there are days in St. Louis when she, and she's not alone, tricks the eyes of department store clerks or the ticket seller at the whites-only theater.

Indeed, she passes. This is something I come to sit with and to admire in its own way. I also know that it was hurtful to members of her family, and in particular, my grandmother, her daughter, who could not pass, as we say, which meant she left her daughter behind, if you will, on those days that she went downtown looking to be misrecognized as a white woman.

Brigid Bergin: If you're just joining us, I'm Brigid Bergin filling in for Brian Lehrer today. We're in the Centennial Series, 100 Years of 100 Things. We're up to thing number 66, the color line. My guest is Martha Jones, legal and cultural historian at Johns Hopkins University and author of the forthcoming book The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir. We have just a few more minutes left in this conversation, but I want to squeeze in another caller. Let's go to Kanani in Harlem. Kanani, you're on WNYC.

Kanani: Hi, you all can hear me.

Brigid Bergin: We can hear you.

Kanani: Perfect. Hi. I'm just so excited. Martha is one of my favorite professors of all time. Martha, I was one of your students in the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at Brooklyn Historical, at the time was called Brooklyn Historical Society, talking about the history of suffrage and abolition of slavery in Brooklyn. I was just blown away by-- Again, I'm from Brooklyn and the history of slavery in the North. I was an educator, I was a director of history. The way that we talk about the founding of our country-- This is the 400-year anniversary of New York City as well. Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Bedford and Stuyvesant, there's over 80-- I learned this in the fellowship, that there were over 83 different streets in Brooklyn alone named after slaveholding families. When we think about the color line and passing, I think an important part of that narrative is power and privilege and access to opportunity. It wasn't just a game. It's just like when I look at video games, I look at video games as metaphors for life. You're warping worlds. You're collecting these coins, you're fighting this villain, and the villain is white supremacy.

The game was to stay alive. The game was maybe you could get access to this opportunity, maybe you were viewed as an asset instead of a liability. You were viewed as being part of this community instead of being delegated to being pathologized. You're criminal, you're lazy, you're shiftless. That was the color line. I think in these conversations that we have about DNA and these DNA tests and what these percentages mean in terms of our identity, it is our human identity to reorient ourselves to valuing people regardless of what they look like, because those percentages don't mean anything when it comes to, again, power, privilege, and access to opportunities.

Just loving your research. You've been in this for such a long time. So many different books. The through line is your passion to expose the truth about America and also to reflect upon it so that we can--

Brigid Bergin: Kanani, I want to thank you, and I want to just give Professor Jones an opportunity to respond. It was so nice to have that little reunion for the two of you right here on air. Professor Jones, Kanani raised some really important points, particularly around the idea of power. Power, privilege, and access. I'm wondering about your response to her call and have a couple more questions related to your own story.

Martha Jones: Sure. I really appreciate, first of all, the reunion, but I appreciate the remark, too, because I do think that part of what I hope the story I tell lets us reflect on is power and I think misunderstandings about power. As Kanani said, that power and the power of race in our culture is never wholly reducible to color. It is far more pernicious and far more far-reaching. I'm able to tell a story in some cases about people who, like my great grandfather, who was a Reconstruction era Black activist in North Carolina, who certainly could have been mistaken for a white man, but who is targeted by Democrats, by white supremacist activists in North Carolina and disappears in my story.

These are not stories that are reducible to simple equations. I take it to be Kanani's story. Can I say one more thing about students? Because I've been an educator now for 25 years, and I remember Kanani very well. I also remember very early on, it was my students who really couldn't resist asking me what I was. They needed to know. It was part of how they were making sense of themselves and the things we were learning. I'm very, very indebted to my students who have always encouraged me to be part of frank and probing conversations about race and identity. Even when I didn't want to have them, frankly.

Brigid Bergin: I so appreciate hearing that reflection. I do wonder beyond the conversations you had with your students, what were the conversations you were having within your own family, with your white mother and Black father, if you were having those conversations with them at all?

Martha Jones: This, too, is part of the story and why I come to write this book, because, in a sense, I missed the opportunity to fully have these conversations with my parents. They've both been gone now for some time. Sometimes family history and our passions for that and our persistence in that is a way of continuing conversations that we'd only begun with elders or having conversations with those who we never knew. There are characters like that in this book who, like my great uncle, who we called the Bishop, he wrote down and recited our family story. I never met him, but the book gave me a chance to talk to him about how he saw it, and me back to him about how I see it today.

Brigid Bergin: Professor Jones, our last question. The terms mixed race and biracial are the ones most commonly used now, but in segments in the past, we've heard from listeners who have said that those terms don't accurately represent them. I'm wondering what your take is on those terms.

Martha Jones: Yes, the first time I published anything publicly about these questions, the headline, which was not written by me, said, "Black and biracial." That's interesting. That's one editor's take on how to describe or characterize or create a box for someone like me. There are these expanding boxes that include biracial and mixed race. In the story I tell, we go back to times when terms like quadroon and mulatto were part of everyday parlance in the early 20th century. Hybrid becomes a pseudo-scientific term.

Partly, this book is a story about language and the words we use. It is also, if you will, a pushback against the way in which language necessarily, but in unsettling ways, constructs its own kinds of boxes and frequently tries to wedge us in when we understand our identities to be far more complex and multifaceted that even the census, which today lets us check as many boxes as we want, can feel constraining, for example, for Americans who do not, in fact, want to or see themselves as identified by racial terms at all.

Brigid Bergin: Professor Jones, I want to thank you so much for sharing your story. That's been the latest installment of the Centennial Series, 100 Years of 100 Things. That was thing number 66, the color line. Our guest has been Martha Jones, legal and cultural historian at Johns Hopkins University and author of the forthcoming The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir. Professor Jones, thank you so much for coming on.

Martha Jones: Thanks so much for having me, Brigid.

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